Right now I am finding it incredibly difficult to believe that I week from today I will be in an entirely different country. After approximately 27 hours spent on airplanes and airports I will be on the other side of the world. The time spent traveling seems more than reasonable for that kind of magical transportation (and yet, if you were to ask me how I feel about it on hour ten of the fourteen hour flight to Seoul, I might answer quite differently).

Am I ready to go? No. Not at all. I need to clean, I need to pack, I need to make a million lists, and do a million tiny errands. I need to say some serious goodbyes. But will I be ready by the time I board my plane? I sure hope so.

The truly important question: how many pairs of pretty shiny heels do I get to take with me? None. I've got a pack (brand new and pretty blue from REI) and I plan on fitting six months worth of material goods into it and onto my back. That in itself will be an adventure. In restraint.

The fact that I am sitting at my computer, wrapped in many layers, woolly socks, and fuzzy slippers, watching thousands of snowflakes fall on top of the two feet of snow that has already accumulated inspires in me a rather ridiculous amount of excitement that a month from today I will be far far away from snow, in sunny warm Thailand, ready to start a new job that will hopefully provide much fodder for the writing of an engaging blog.

Where I am.

Yes indeed! If you haven't already heard, and I have no idea if you have (and likely, no one is even reading my blog anymore, so I'll have to tell you all about it again) I am going to Thailand in March to take on a job teaching English. I couldn't find a real job here in this country, so I found one abroad! I'll spend my first month there in training, learning how on earth one teaches another language without speaking any of the language one's students speak. The new school semester doesn't start right away, so I'll spend the next month traveling goodness knows where and hopefully having some grand adventures! The job will start after that, a 4-5 month teaching position at a Thai school. I'm not sure yet exactly where that will be, or what ages my students will be, but I'm excited to find out.

Where I'm headed.

So I have about two weeks left here in Baltimore, and then I'll pack up my life, pray that it stills fits into my car and head home to Ohio, hopefully stopping to see some favorite friends and family on the way. Then a week or so at home where I can unpack, repack, store everything else in Mom and Dad's attic (thanks guys!), get some shots, see the dentist, freak out about everything etc., etc... Then I fly away on March 5 and spend more than a day in airports and airplanes. I'll arrive in Bangkok in some surely crazy, exhausted, exhilarated, and most likely hungry, state of mind and start my training program the next day! Can't Wait!

Spain!!

We just left Spain, the very last port of this voyage. I’ve got really mixed feelings, because its sad that its over, but I’m very excited to be headed home, back to friends and family and all that good stuff. I’m looking forward to the stability of being in one place for more than a week. But Spain was good, really really good.

The first day in Cadiz, it was a little cold and rainy, so I just explored the city with two of my friends, and we visited lots of churches and cathedrals to try and stay dry. We also went into a convent, which was sortof cool. We walked to the shore and admired the Atlantic for a little while, each of us trying to figure out how long it had been since we had last seen that ocean and then the rain got a lot harder and we ended up spending the next two and a half hours sitting under a playground in the park, just talking and eating all the Spanish chocolate we had bought earlier that day. When the rain finally went away, we found a big stone fort that had been turned partially into a museum that was displaying lots of very weird contemporary art, and that was fun to look at. Then we had lunch at a random little street corner café where I had the most amazing thing. According to the menu, they were shrimp tortillas, but they weren’t shrimp wrapped up in tortillas they were crispy fried tortilla type things that had teeny little shrimps in the batter itself. They were awesome. Then we walked back to the ship because ewe all had tickets to see Flamenco that night as an SAS trip. The Flamenco night was a lot of fun. The first stop we went to was outside (and cold!) a bull ring where we saw a dancing horse and a cow who was in training to become a fighting bull. The mini bull fighting session was actually really weird and sortof sad. It seemed like the guys were just being mean to the little calf by tiring him out making him run at a stupid waving cape. We never found out if he had passed the test to become a real bull. Then we went inside to watch flamenco, drink sangria, and eat tapas, and that was altogether lots and lots of fun. The flamenco dancers were amazing, and after the show they opened up a dance floor and we all had the chance to dance for ourselves.

The second day in Spain was when things got exciting. Three of my friends had made last minute plans the night before we got to Spain to go to Paris, and I was really jealous of them for getting to do something really exciting like that. So my friend Erin and I decided that we wanted to go somewhere cool too (that would hopefully be cheaper to get to than Paris). And so…. Bright and early the second day we hopped a bus that took us down to the southern tip of Spain and then we took a ferry to….

(drumroll please…..)

MOROCCO!

I went to Morocco!!!! It was so much fun!!! It was an absolutely ridiculous, spur of the moment decision, but we went and it was amazing. It was incredibly simple to just take a ferry to Africa. A stamp on our passports and filling out a little form and we were there, in Tangiers! Erin had been to other parts of Morocco before, so we had some idea of what to expect, but not really a whole lot. It rained the entire first day we were there, so we spent the morning trying to dodge the rain (but not really minding it because it was Moroccan rain and that is cooler than normal rain). We shopped a little bit and found a cheap hotel where we could leave our stuff and know we actually would have a place to sleep once it got dark. We had lunch in a restaurant that was really good. Erin ate pizza and I had tangine-cooked chicken in vegetables. Ordering lunch was really funny, we were expecting everybody to speak Arabic, (and neither of us really know much more than please and thank you in that language) but Erin had a little bit of Spanish and since we were right across from Spain we figured that might come in handy, but when it came to the restaurants and the shopping, it was actually mostly my high school French that came in handy, since Morocco used to be a French colony. So they entire time we were in Tangiers, we spent speaking a very strange combination of French, English, Spanish, and Arabic, and eventually, I think we got everything figured out. So lunch was awesome, then we spent the afternoon getting soaking wet wandering around, stopped in a men’s only gambling type place (I don’t think real gambling is legal, so they all played with bottle caps) to escape the rain and drink delicious Moroccan tea (super sweet and minty, and miraculous even better than Turkish apple tea had been) and then the sun started to go down and we realized we were soaking wet and horribly lost and had no idea where our hotel with all our stuff in it was. It probably took us more than two hours to find the hotel, getting wetter and wetter as we searched. We finally had to walk all the way back to where the ferry had dropped us off to retrace our steps. We we so happy to find the hotel, and we immediately got inside changed into the small amount of dry clothes we had, pulled all the blankets off one bed and put them on the other (the room wasn’t heated – turns out that’s why it was so cheap) and we curled up in bed, playing cards, until we warmed up enough to go out again. We never did manage to go out again that night because we ended up falling asleep.

We woke up the next morning to much nicer weather, put on our still soaking wet clothes and found breakfast of tea and croissants at a nearby café. Then we did basically the same thing we had done the day before of wandering around, looking at stores, and laughing over the absolute craziness of our presence in Morocco. We walked along the beach for a while. We ate delicious bread in the marketplace. We almost got talked into buying expensive carpets (they were lovely) but had to resist. And then, in the midafternoon when it started to rain again, we took the ferry back across to Spain. We met a guy from Indiana on the ferry who had been backpacking around Europe for the past three months and we all made friends and shared travel stories. When we got back to Tarifa (Spain) we decided to hang around there for the night and the three of us found a hostel to stay in and spent the evening exploring Tarifa, walking through the old city, playing on the beach, and climbing up a steep hill to an old abandoned castle were that evenings big entertainments.

The next morning our new friend left for a kitesurfing lesson and Erin and I spent the morning looking around some of the parts of Tarifa that hadn’t been open the day before (it had been Sunday). Early that afternoon we took the bus back to Cadiz and it was really nice to get back to the ship and put on actually dry clothes – my shoes had been sopping wet for the past two days.

The last day in Spain I spent in and around Cadiz. I hung out with a bigger group of friends, and we walked around in search of a shopping mall for people who needed last minute suitcases to pack up everything they had bought over the past three months and shared stories about our adventures in Morocco, Paris, Sevilla, Barcelona, Madrid, etc. We spent our last afternoon drinking Sangria in the park, enjoying the sunlight. It was quite lovely.

It was a little bit sad to get back onto the ship, knowing that it mean this trip is essentially over (aside from finals). But I really am very excited about coming home. I miss lots of people, and things and all that. And its really awesome that I’ll be getting home during the Christmas season, because that’s one of my favorite times of year. For those of you out there that are really excited for me to get back, I’ll be in Miami on Friday December 7th, then I’m spending the weekend down in Florida with Kate and I’ll be flying back into Delaware late on Sunday night. I’ll spend a couple days in Ohio and then I think I’ll drive to Pittsburgh maybe on Thursday and spend a long weekend helping all my friends from school study for their finals (ha!). So if you want to get a hold of me, I’ll be back in the country in a little over a week! Yay!!

Croatia!!

Wow. I am so sorry to all of you out there you have been loyal fans to my blog all semester that it has taken me such a ridiculously long time to update it after Istanbul. (actually, I have no idea if any loyal fans really exist, but I thought I’d apologize anyways). But here it is!

Croatia.

Croatia was not actually a particularly exciting place, but it ended up being really nice to just relax a little bit in port without the worry of trying to see it all and fit everything into five days. Instead, the highlight of Dubrovnik is a cute little walled city where you can walk on the walls, look out over the ocean, and meander the little cobblestone streets. You might eat some delicious food while you’re at it, but basically that can all be accomplished in one day. You don’t actually need five.

So to keep this kindof short and sweet because I’d rather talk about the exciting things that happened in Spain. The first day in Croatia I did all the things I talked about above. We had horrible weather that day, it was cold, rainy, and when we were up on the walls it even started hailing. But Dubrovnik was a beautiful city, walking around the old part of the city was a bit like going back in time a couple hundred years.

The second day my friends Lauren and Erin and I took a bus to Split, the second largest city in Croatia. We left super early in the morning to catch the bus at 6:00am and got to Split a little after 10:00. The bus ride had been beautiful, I saw the sun rise and the whole drive was along the coast of the Adriatic (I think…) which was covered by these rugged, craggy mountains. We also drove for about half an hour through Bosnia and actually took a rest stop there, so I can now say I’ve officially stepped onto Bosnian soil. Once we were in Split it was just another cute little town, it didn’t feel like a big city at all. But we had fun walking around, visiting book stores and looking at travel books and making more plans for other trips. We walked around the old palace, saw a church turned into a cultural museum that along with historical artifacts had a show up of photographs from Tibet (made me really want to go to Tibet too, so I’m adding that one to my growing list). We had lunch at a little pizza place and drank Croatian beer (pizza was really good, the beer not so great) and then we had ice cream for dessert (even though it was still really cold out). We caught the bus back that same day around 5:00, so we had another couple hours of beautiful scenery before the sun set and we drove back through Bosnia (so now I’ve been there twice!) and back home to Dubrovnik.

The second day I walked around Dubrovnik by myself. It was the first time I had spent a lot of time out and about in a country by myself, and it was actually really nice. I walked along the water for a long time, went to a couple museums, and treated myself to a fancy lunch. It was very peaceful.

The third day we took a ferry boat ride out to one of the nearby islands and spent the day exploring. We walked through the woods and lived off the fresh clementines and pomegranates that we picked from trees along our path. We were walking through what I think were public areas, so I’m not sure if anyone actually owned the fruit trees. We came to the conclusion that it wasn’t stealing if we picked the fruits that hung over the path itself and we’d offer to pay if anyone came out and yelled at us. Nobody yelled, and the fresh fruits were absolutely incredible.

The last day I went back to the old city and walked around the walls one more time. And then spent a couple more hours just wandering around, even though at that point I think I had seen it all already. It was actually really nice to not have anything pressing that I needed to see or do. Dubrovnik was a lovely little town and I’m sure we would have had an incredible time if we had been there during the actual summer tourist season when the beaches would have been fun and there would have been tons of other things to do. As it was, the area was slowing down, getting ready for winter. To enjoy our stay in Dubrovnik, you had to mentally avoid calling the place boring, and instead call it relaxing and soothing.

Happy Turkey Days!

I realize its not yet Thanksgiving back at home, but I just finished up my turkey days in Istanbul and had an awesome time!

The first day in Istanbul I spent walking around with three of my friends. Our ship was parked on the Asia side of the city, but we walked from Asia to Europe and took lots of pictures of ourselves on the bridge that connects the two continents (I know people that have stood in four states at one time, but not many people who have done two continents at the same time). So we ended up spending most of our first day on the Europe side. We had breakfast in a cute little patisserie where the guys spoke no English at all, so we placed out orders by pointing – which is always fun. We walked through the spice bazaar and were just absolutely inundated by smells of spices and teas that were wonderful, especially when compared to the smells we’ve been recently assaulted by in India and Egypt. The spice bazaar was really fun, the salesmen here were so much more easygoing than they had been in most of the other countries, they didn’t hassle you the moment you walked in, and would serve you delicious apple tea once you got a little more involved in the sale. We left the spice bazaar and wandered our way uphill looking in little stores with no particular destination in mind. We found ourselves drawn to the shops selling hats, gloves, and scarves, because for the first time this whole trip, it finally felt like the right temperature for the season – and for me, in November, that means cold and rainy. And that’s what we got. We were all happy to see red and brown leaves falling off trees because autumn doesn’t actually happen in a lot of countries it seems. But, back to our meandering walk, at the top of the hill we found a pretty mosque that we looked at, it was prayertime, so we couldn’t go in, but we stopped for lunch at a café across the street and then went back into the mosque afterwards. It was a pretty place, we wondered if maybe it was the blue mosque or something, because we thought that was supposed to be somewhere in the area, but realized the blue mosque is probably something you know you are seeing when you see it (this one really wasn’t impressive enough) so this one was just a smaller mosque, of which there are many dotting the city and making the skyline very pretty. From the mosque, we continued wandering through the hilly streets and little stores in a meandering sort of way. We found lots of cute little shops and ogled lots of cute Turkish guys, and so that was a fun afternoon. When it started to get darker and colder, we headed back to Asia and on our way back to the ship found a place selling really cheap phone cards so we all took the opportunity to briefly call home and that was nice. Mom had to rescue cookies from the oven, so she couldn’t talk long, so I grabbed a cup of hot chocolate and waited for my friends to finish up their conversations in a little café nearby.

The second day in Istanbul, I spent exploring the Asia side with my friend Sam. We started off the day with fresh squeezed orange and pomegranate juice from a street vendor and a loaf of fresh baked bread from a baker as we climbed up a hugely steep hill to the Galata tower – from which you can see an incredible view of the city. We then continued walking along the hilly part that sort of overlooks the river and the other bank because it was super pretty up there and we came upon a tiny little art museum, where, funny enough, they were having an Andy Warhol show (because I don’t see enough of that back in Pittsburgh). But we decided to go it and it was fun, because they had an interesting collection of modern American/Western art and also a collection of more traditional Western oil paintings of Turkish people done rather stereotypically or imagined (sexy ladies in harems and the like) and from the blurbs you could tell that even though the pieces were lovely, the Turkish museum didn’t really approve of their content or their context. We walked from the museum toward Taksim (one of Istanbul’s many districts) stopping in churches and window shopping along the way. We had lunch, got over-charged for food we didn’t mean to order, and left frustrated. We kept walking through the business district and eventually found our way to an outdoor theater and form there to a pretty park where we see-sawed for the first time in years. Both of our cameras take video, so we filmed each other bouncing up and down on the see-saw (teeter-totter? I’m never sure what to call them) and its pretty funny to watch. We finally reached the Dolmabache palace (which was our ultimate goal for the day) but it was closed when we got there, so that was sad.

The third day, we took a boat ride up the bosphorus to a tiny little fishing village. The ferry ride was a lot of fun, the scenery was just beautiful, we sailed past the ruins of lots of stone walls and fortresses. We had lunch in the little village (yummy fresh caught fish!) and then decided to walk around because we had a few hours before the next ferry would come to pick us up. We picked a random direction in hopes of climbing up into the hills for a good view of the river and ended up finding not only a spectacular view, but the ruins of an ancient castle that you could climb around on. The view from the very top of the hill was incredible because you could see the bosphorus on one side and the black sea on the other. The day was clear and sunny, and it was absolutely perfect to spend the afternoon climbing on potentially dangerous rocky ruins. On the ferry ride back, we made sure to sit on the other side of the boat so we could check out everything on the other side of the river. We got back into Istanbul just as the sun was starting to set, and it was the most incredible moment to see all the mosques backlit by the sun from the water with seagulls flying all around. We stopped back into the spice bazaar to buy more delicious teas and Turkish delights and then walked back across the continents to find dinner in Asia. We went back to the ship for a while, but went back out to spend the evening in a Turkish café/bar, smoking a hookah and drinking yummy apple tea and super-strong coffee (like in Egypt, smoking a hookah/shisha/waterpipe is totally the cool thing to do). We made friends with our server, it was quite fun.

The next day we took the tram to Sultanamet – which is one of the most important districts to visit in Istanbul when you’re touristing there, because that’s where the blue mosque and the haggia Sophia are. We tried to go to the blue mosque first, but we got there during prayer-time so we weren’t allowed in. So we walked across to the Hagia Sophia and went in there first and it was absolutely amazing. The story behind the place is that the majority of what still stands was built as a basilica around 400 ad., but when the Muslims took over the city in 1400, they turned the church into a mosque by adding minarets and covering up lots of the old Christian frescoes. Since then, the place has been secularized and the frescoes have been uncovered, so now its an incredible combination of Christianity and Islam. The inside of the Haggia Sophia was most definitely one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. It was huge and so ornate, it was unbelievable. There were two art shows within the hagia Sophia. On the first floor was an exhibition by a Turkish painter of turkey and mosques and other cultural things done in a somewhat abstracted, contemporary fashion, they were very cool, very fun to look at, they were also all for sale, but completely out of my price range. The exhibition on the second level was of photography of the haggis Sophia itself – they were absolutely beautiful photos, so wonderfully detailed, they captured the place so much better than my little tiny pictures with my little tiny camera ever could. Seeing the photos and the real thing at the same time was magical. When we left the Hagia Sophia, we went back to the blue mosque and it was open now. It too was very beautiful inside, but also sort of felt like just another beautiful mosque (its rather ridiculous how many mosques I’ve seen in the past two weeks after having never been inside on until this point in my life) it was lovely, but by no means as fantastic as the Hagia Sophia. Then we had lunch at a street corner café – we had these sliced meat sandwiches that are THE thing to have (they’re called doner sandwiches) they are for sale absolutely everywhere. Then we went to the grand bazaar and spent a few hours being overwhelmed by the enormity of the place and resisted the urge to buy large-scale stained glass/light pieces (he offered me a pretty good deal by the end of it, but there was no way I could have gotten in home). After the bazaar, our group split up, and Erin and I headed back toward the mosques in search of the basilica cistern that we had heard was really cool. It took a while to find, because the whole place is underground, with only a small ticket booth above ground. The cistern is a huge underground cavern supported by 360some columns that used to store water back in the day of aquaducts. Now, its open to the public and when you go down, it feels like what the creepy place in the phantom of the opera probably feels like. Its wet and slippery, and sortof creepy with eerily lit columns and the sound of dripping water from the rain. It was a place with definite atmosphere, it was very cool. There are two large medusa head sculptures in the back of the cistern, one of which is upside-down, the other is sideways, and no one quite knows why they were built that way, but they were.

On our last day in Istanbul, Erin and I decided to sortof take it easy. We slept in and then took a tram back to Sultanamet because our goal was to see the Topkapi palace that had been closed when we had tried to go there the day before. Since we got there in the morning, it was open, and we spent a long time looking through the multiple courtyards. It was a very pretty place, there are four gardened courtyards and all of the palace rooms have been turned into museum spaces where they exhibit collections of historical Turkish things. We saw everything from carriages, to a collection of Chinese pottery, to clothing and jewelry, to portraits if the sultans, and an armory of swords and rifles. It was a really interesting opportunity to learn a lot about Turkish history simply by looking at the artifacts and reading the little blurbs about them. The palace was very different from the European-type castle that I had sortof been expecting, the layout of the courtyards was different and it wasn’t build up tall at all, it just spread out to cover lots of ground. Anyways, it was different. The view from the palace of the bosphorus and the other side of the city was also quite incredible. I wouldn’t mind living in the palace and having a view like that. Erin and I walked back from the palace, exploring a little bit more as we went and then stopped back into the hookah place to spend the rest of the afternoon watching the soccer game and drinking more tea. It was fun, it was nice to end on a sort of relaxing day. As my third to last country, I’m realizing that I’m ending the entire voyage in a more relaxing way, I no longer have huge cross-country train trips coming up, and I’m planning on spending a little more time just getting to know individual cities, the back alleys and the teeny cafes and all that good stuff. I think it’ll be nice after all the busyness.

EGYPT!!!!

Oh my god!!! I just went to Egypt. It was amazing, incredible, wonderful…. I still can’t believe I just had the opportunity to actually live out one of my elementary school dreams!

We sailed into Egypt through the Suez canal, which was a really fun experience. We had the day off of classes and instead had the Sea Olympics (we’re all in seas… like teams depending on which deck we’re on) and we played lots of dumb games to win the ultimate prize of who gets to get off the ship first in Miami (my team came in dead last L). Sailing through the suez canal was beautiful, and it was so incredibly nice to see land after ten days of pure ocean.

We got into Alexandria the next day, and as soon as the ship was cleared, I left on my four day Cairo/Luxor trip. The bus ride from Alexandria to Cairo took about 3 hours, and I was tired so I slept most of the way. I woke up in Cairo when my tour guide started pointing out important sites to us, and it was amazing to see the pyramids (THE PYRAMIDS!!!) rise up behind all the high rise hotels. They’re right there, they’re just right there on the edge of the city!!! We had a delicious lunch at a fancy restaurant and I basically ate tomatoes and dessert because right now the tomatoes are in season and the dessert buffet was incredible.

After lunch we hopped back on the bus and drove to Sakkara to see the step pyramid. It was so cool, it was huge, and … steppy. We then drove back into Cairo as the sun was setting to see a light show on the pyramids (the big three). The light show was horribly hokey, but also really cool, simply because we were at the pyramids. The talking sphinx told us, and I quote, “the world fears time, but time [pause] fears [pause] the pyramids… bum…bum. .bum…” it was hilarious. Then we went to a night bazaar (the second oldest bazaar still in existence in the world) and in the process of buying a couple scarves, and Egyptian woman showed us the correct way to actually wrap a veil on. It was pretty cool. The Egyptian men are very loud and… affectionate? That’s not really the right word… but anyways, they really enjoy cat-calls so we got lots of “senorita, I love you’s” , whistles, and “I have what you looking for” (though I think that time he was just trying to sell me a shirt). We got back to our hotel around 11:00, ate dinner (again, absolutely delicious food – it was more Mediterranean than I was expecting: hummous and pita, tomatoes, eggplant, good olives, lots of fruit, and many many desserts), and then we went up to our rooms. I was rooming with my friend Sam and we had fun bouncing on our incredibly fluffy beds and watching the news (in English!!) to catch up a little bit on what been going on in the world.

We had a wake up call at 4:00 the next morning so we could drive to the pyramids to see them at sunrise. Normally the area doesn’t open to the public until 8:00, but somehow semester at sea got special permission to be there two hours early to actually see the sun rise. It was incredible. Beautiful. Wow. I saw the sunrise at the pyramids – that’s just insane. But I did it. It was really cool (temperature) that morning before the sun was the whole way up, which surprised me after how hot it had been the day before (I guess what I’ve heard about crazy temperatures in deserts is true). We were at the pyramids for a long time, we went on camel rides, and had the chance to actually touch them and climb on them and take lots of amazing pictures. It was awesome, and then we saw the sphinx and that was also unbelievable. We drove from the pyramids to Memphis (the first capitol of Egypt) and wandered around there. There’s really not a whole lot at Memphis anymore except a couple statues and men trying to sell you stuff, but it’s cool to be able to say I was there. From Memphis, we drove back into Cairo to have lunch on the Nile. We had lunch on the nile. The NILE!!! We were on a big boat which served us a buffet lunch and we had live music by three guys on crazy traditional instruments and there was a belly dancer and a whirling dervish and it was very very fun to see.

After lunch we got back on the busses to see the Citadel of Saladin and the Alabaster Mosque. The mosque was built for Mohammed Ali (not the boxer) a long time ago and it was the most beautiful example of Islamic architecture I’ve ever seen (though istanbul is next, so maybe that’ll win). The ceiling was a huge round dome with dangling glass lights and super-intricate designs in metal and wood and carpet. It was beautiful. We were there during a call to prayer, so we were able to watch the Muslim men actually praying toward Mecca. We went from the mosque to the Cairo Museum (the official Egyptian Archaeological Museum) and it was marvelous too. We didn’t have nearly enough time to be there (as you may see, we had packed quite a lot into one day), but Sam and I did manage to make it through pretty much the whole place. We saw rooms full of sarcophaguses, jewelry, ancient tools, statues, the king Tut collection (his gold mask!!!!), the only thing we missed were the mummies, because it cost extra to see them and we didn’t have time for that anyways. The museum was insanely crowded, there was just so much of everything, so much history just laid on in front of us, on shelves, in cases, everywhere. It was wonderful, I felt like I could have spent days there.

We went back to the hotel for a late dinner and then I headed out for an evening in Cairo with three of my friends. We had a wake up call at 2:15 the next morning, so we figured there was really no point in letting it be a wakeup call, we might as well stay up all night. So after dinner, Sam, Erin, Lauren, and I found a shishah bar (which is where EVERYONE in Egypt spends their evenings) and we hung out there for a few hours and smoked and drank yummy mint tea and mango juice. We made friends with the other customers and the guys running the place, and I think they all got a big kick out of our being there. We left the bar around midnight and spent the next hour and a half strolling along the Nile enjoying the cool breeze, the lights on the riverboats, and the fact that we were strolling along the Nile. Cairo really is a city that never sleeps, there were crowds of people around the whole time we walked, I guess it makes sense to try and be awake when the temperature is most agreeable.

So Sam and I got back to the hotel in time to shower and repack our stuff before we boarded the buses to drive to the airport for our 5:00am flight to Luxor. The airport was a crowded mess and it was pretty hectic trying to get on the plane in time. The power on the plane shut off moments after we got on (before we flew) which was sortof scary, but by this point I was pretty exhausted and it didn’t really bother me as much as it probably should have. My sleep-deprived self actually found it more annoying when the lights finally came back on and woke me up. The flight was only about an hour, but I really don’t remember anything between the lights coming on and the announcements that we would soon be landing. The view out the airplane window of luxor and all the sandy desert was wonderful.

We went from the airport to the Valley of the Kings, where I saw the tombs of King Tut, Ramses IV, Ramses VI, and some other famous dead guy. The tombs were (like everything else) incredible. King tut’s was packed full of people, and hot and humid (you understand how that paintings are being destroyed by the humidity the moment you walk in) but I was about 4 ft from his actual mummy, and that is just so unbelievable. The paintings in Tut’s tomb weren’t actually that spectacular, but the ones in those of the rameses’ were. It’s almost impossible to believe that we were seeing paintings that are literally thousands of years old – they’re still carefully detailed and colorful. I really wasn’t expecting them to still be that colorful.

We went from the Valley of the Kings to the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut which is this huge columned complex that is basically carved right out of the cliff face in the desert. Then we saw the Colossi of Memnon which sounds a lot cooler than they actually were. Just two big statues in the middle of the desert, but again, its good to be able to say I saw them. We drove back to Luxor for lunch and afterwards while some people went on an optional (ie pay more) tour of the city in horse drawn carriages I finally had the chance to fall asleep (which after about 34 hours of being awake, I think was a justified choice). I got a good 2 and a half hour nap in before we left to go to Luxor Temple and see it all lit up at night. Luxor temple was one of those huge columned places, where there’s no longer a roof, but there are lots of a awesome statues and carvings and the columns are absolutely massive. After the temple, we went back to the hotel for dinner (mmm…. More delicious food! But I wondered how truly Egyptian it was, if it was served in a fairly westernized hotel. There was pita, but there was pasta too – still, it tasted good) Once we’d finished off a big plate of chocolate mousse Sam and Karen and I explored the area around the hotel in search of an internet café. We finally found a nice cheap one where I had the chance to figure out my spring course schedule and what was even more exciting was that Sam let me borrow her Skype account and I called home and got to talk to Mom. That was really awesome, she didn’t know who I was at first, but she figured it out.

I got to sleep in the next morning till the super-late hour of about 7:00 am and we broke our fasts at the hotel before driving to the Karnak Temple. It was the same concept as the Luxor Temple, except even more complex and massive. I had thought the columns the day before had been huge, no, these were ginormous. The thing with the temples, is that each pharaoh would try to leave their mark by adding something onto the temples, so over time, they just got huger and grander. We had lunch after that and then had to head back to the airport to fly back to Cairo to drive back to Alexandria. That took awhile. I somehow couldn’t sleep, so I spent the travel time zoning out with my music.

The next morning, Sam, Erin, Lauren, and I spent the day enjoying Alexandria. We shopped, and saw some of the touristy places (the library, the fort where the famous light house used to be…) but we mainly just relaxed and shopped. We all needed stamps and there were a couple packages that needed sent home, so we ended up spending a good part of the afternoon searching for a post office and when we finally found one, they would only ship things express (re. expensive). The nicest man in the world led us from that bank to another branch where they would ship things for us (he worked at the second branch, and he spoke excellent English, so he was very helpful). By the time we got there, though, for some reason they couldn’t ship things out that day, so our new friend offered to mail the packages out for us the next day – it was so incredibly nice of him. In all, we probably took up almost 2 hours of his day, and he still invited us back to visit him the next time we were in Egypt so that was wonderful. After lots of Egyptian men who just wanted to whistle at us or sell us stuff, it was really nice to find one who was simply willing to help us. Actually, that’s something about the entire trip that’s been amazing, there’s almost always been someone willing to help us, or try to help us. I think I’m going to have to be nicer to tourists when I’m back home. Even just saying “welcome to the U.S.!” or something like that, because we heard a lot of “welcome to egypt’s!” and that was really nice, very friendly.

India!!!

It’s the second day back on the ship after my five days in India, and I finally have found the time to update me blog and check my email, and try to catch up a little with life back home in my real world. So here’s the India story:

On the first day in Chennai, we finally got off the ship around noon and my friend Kait and I hired a autorickshaw driver to take us around the city for the day for about 5 dollars. It seemed like a good price, and there is no other easy way to get around. Our first stop was a Hindu temple where a guy tried to give us a tour we didn’t want and then attempted to make us pay for it, but we had the chance to see a very pretty place and get a first taste of the sights and sounds and smells of India. Then we pointed to a couple other destinations that were on our list of sightseeing stops, and told the driver he could figure out the best way to take us to al those places, since we didn’t really know the city. Instead he drove us to a bunch of fancy emporiums that sold really beautiful really expensive things like lifesized bronze elephants and ginormous oriental rugs – neither of which could we afford or fit back into our rooms on the ship. We realized pretty quickly, that like in some of the other countries we’d been to, the drivers get paid to take their customers to shops, or they get things like free t-shirts. The driver eventually tried to hike up the price of our day while we were driving, and when we wouldn’t pay more, he simply took us back to the ship. We were a little disappointed, but had wanted to stop by an orphanage that afternoon, so we changed our plans a little and set off again in the other direction. We got a ride from the family of one of our inter-port students, which turned out to be a great thing because the orphanage was pretty hard to find. My experience at the orphanage was a harsh shock of reality. We saw deformed kids who were missing arms or legs or had serious burns and rashes all over their bodies. We played and fed little babies who seemed so mentally challenged that they barely even responded to our touch. It was so sad, but also nice that they were at least taken care of by good people. Kait and I went from the orphanage to the beach – this time finding a more reliable driver – and we spend the late afternoon people watching (the beach was completely different from any beach back home) before heading back to the security of the ship once it got dark.

I left early the next morning (around 5:00) for my three day trip to see Delhi and the Taj Mahal. We spent pretty much all of the first day in travel. We spent the morning on the plane, had lunch in Delhi, took a tour of the city from the bus, only getting off at a single stop, and then spent seven hours that evening on the train to get to Agra. Our single stop was actually a very beautiful place, but the rest of the day was pretty crappy – I felt like we spent way too much time transporting ourselves from one place to another, without actually seeing the places. Actually the train station was a pretty intense experience too. The whole time we were waiting for our train, we were surrounded by beggars and homeless people sleeping between the tracks. We saw rats and cockroaches, and were incredibly thankful that our tickets got us seats in the air-conditioned part of the train. Just the general dirt and grime of the station was a bit of a shocker. We finally got to Agra around 12:30 or 1:00 and then it was another 45 minutes or so before we made it to the hotel and into our beds. It was a long day.

We woke up at 5 the next morning so we could watch the sunrise at the Taj Mahal, and it was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. The Taj was amazing. It was just so indescribably beautiful and so surreal to actually be seeing and touching something that I’ve seen pictures of my entire life. I never thought I would actually see the taj mahal, and I did, and I still can’t believe it, but I do have pictures to prove it to you guys and to myself. After sunrise we went back to the hotel for breakfast and then drove about an hour outside of the city to see an ancient Muslim city that was also amazingly beautiful in a falling-apart-ruins sort of way. We had lunch (mmm spicy Indian food!!) and then spent the early afternoon at a fort in Agra that was built I think about 600 years ago by the grandson of the guy who build the taj mahal. It too was incredible. The view from the palace was magnificent, you could see fields and the river and the Taj Mahal in the background. We then went back to the Taj Mahal again for sunset and this time it was considerably more crowded with tourists, and beggars, and cute little kids trying to sell us stuff. The point of seeing the Taj and sunrise and sunset, by the way, is so you can see the white marble changing colors in the changing light. It is pretty cool. I took a ridiculous number of pictures. The other funny thing about the whole day was how many times I had my picture taken. People would come up to my friend Christina and I at all of the sightseeing places and ask if they could take a picture with us. We were asked by everybody, little kids, twenty-something guys, entire families, its sortof crazy how many Indians now have pictures of me at my hot and sweaty, dirty, unshowered best. According to our tourguide, many of the people asking for pictures were from more rural areas, and hadn’t seen many white people before – so I guess they wanted proof of seeing us now, but it was pretty weird. Before dinner, we went to a marble workshop where we saw workers decorating white marble with inlaid precious stones the same way it was done hundreds of years ago on the taj mahal. They were also selling the marble pieces at the shop and I was really tempted to buy an inlaid table for a couple thousand dollars but had to resist the urge. We had dinner back at the hotel (this time they served us a weird buffet of a variety of asian food and some attempts at western food that didn’t really come out the way it maybe was supposed to… but the ice cream and the naan was good) and then we went back to the train station to catch an evening train back to Delhi. This time we were on a faster train, and we made it in about three hours without any stops. They served us another dinner on the train, and that one was actually really good. We got back late into Delhi and spent the night in a really fancy hotel that had the most blissfully comfortable beds in the world as well as a working shower that was also heavenly to use after a long day.

The next day we slept in a little later and then took another driving tour of Delhi in the morning before heading to the airport to spent pretty much the entire day flying or waiting to fly. Both of our flights got delayed, so it was s ort of a frustrating trip home. Actually, the entire trip was somewhat frustrating in that although the middle day was incredible and perfect and I wouldn’t have changed a minute of it, the days of travel on both sides kindof sucked.

On my final day in India I went on a class trip to the Working Women’s Forum of Chennai, an organization that works to empower women by giving them loans, job training, and classes in their legal rights. It was an awesome place. We met the president of the organization who told us all about the place and how it works and the amazing number of women it has helped in the thirty years of its existence. We also got to attend one of the classes and asked the women themselves questions about their experiences with the organization and how they and they’re families have benefited from it. From there, two friends (Erin and Christina) and I got a ride to the giant shopping mall (Spencer’s) in the center of Chennai and spent the rest of the day doing a combination of window shopping at the really expensive things and bartering and buying the more affordable ones. It was a wonderful place. We’ve all decided that its going to be really hard to go home and have to pay fixed prices for things. I picture myself walking into a store and seeing something for thirty dollars, telling the clerk I would give them five, and then getting thrown out. It’ll be fun. After spending all of our rupees (and without going back to the ATMs to get any more) we took another autorickshaw back to the ship so we could unload our purchases, shower, and eat free food that we knew to be clean and pasteurized.

India was a really interesting experience. Before we got there, they gave us tons of lectures on how sad and how impoverished some of the things we would see would be. The actuality of it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had imagined (though there were some shady areas) but it was still really sad to see in a lot of places. I think the combination of seeing the train station and the Taj Mahal in the same day was probably a really good summary of India – both its highs and its lows.